We like the job the NY Times did with the passing of Ted Hood…
Ted Hood, a yachtsman, sailmaker, rigging builder and boat designer, not to mention a helmsman who captained Courageous, the 1974 America’s Cup winner, died on June 28 in Middletown, R.I. He was 86.
A lifelong sailor, Hood was 7 years old when he jerry-built his first sailboat, fitting a mast and centerboard into a flat-bottom rowboat. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he began repairing sails to help pay for college, using his grandmother’s sewing machine in a bedroom of the family home in Marblehead, Mass. After discovering that sails, then largely made of cotton canvas, were often badly sewn or sloppily cut, he took them apart and remade them into stauncher products that improved the performance of boats. Read on.
